News of Note

BP Faces More Complaints Over Wildlife Injuries
Do wildlife victims of the Gulf oil spill have legal recourse? Not really, was the short answer. But that has not stopped some folks from trying. Attorneys general in 10 Atlantic Coast states, including New York, Maryland, and North Carolina, have sent letters to BP complaining about the potential effects of the oil spill on birds and marine life along their coasts.

Animal rights activists target BP
Animal rights advocates are pushing prosecutors to go after oil giant BP with a new weapon: animal cruelty charges.Animal rights and human wrongs
In the U.S. alone, we are responsible for the torture and slaughter of more than 25 million animals EVERY SINGLE DAY. While many may be astounded by the numbers and not believe them, others will simply say, “So what?” “Why should we care?” “They are only animals?” The reasons to care are many, and I will try to address a few.As demand grows for locally raised meat, farmers turn to mobile slaughterhousesAlong with mid-size and small farms, the number of federally inspected slaughterhouses has been dropping, from 1,627 in 1980 to 1,051 in 2010, according to the USDA. Today, four corporations slaughter 80 percent of the cattle in the United States. In Wyoming, for example, where cattle ranching is so iconic that license plates carry an image of a cowboy, there is no longer a single slaughterhouse inspected by either the federal or state government.3rd Circuit Turns Down Animal Activists’ Appeal
The full 3rd Circuit won’t reconsider a panel decision upholding the convictions of six animal-rights activists who used their website to incite threats and vandalism against researchers in a New Jersey lab.

Chimps, Too, Wage War and Annex Rival TerritoryChimpanzee warfare is of particular interest because of the possibility that both humans and chimps inherited an instinct for aggressive territoriality from their joint ancestor who lived some five million years ago. Only two previous cases of chimp warfare have been recorded, neither as clear-cut as the Ngogo case.